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How Cosette was treated by the Thenardiers. Volume 2, Book 3, Chapter 2.

Clips from <Il cuore di Cosette>.

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And good old misogynist Hugo returns with his description of Mme Thénardier. Yes, she is cruel to Cosette. But in Hugo’s eyes, her main offence is her lack of femininity. Nothing about her fits the tiny and fragile ideal of an "Angel in the House." However, she is hard-working and single-handedly manages all the tasks in the tavern: “She did everything about the house,—made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and everything else.” And since her shitty husband has squandered all their money, they cannot afford to hire any servants and instead exploit Cosette. In Hugo’s view, the only redeeming quality of Mme Thénardier is her submission to her husband. Such a judgment doesn't come as a surprise.

Moving on, Hugo delves into the character of Thénardier, devoting pages upon pages to his description. He relishes portraying despicable characters, and Thénardier is one of his personal favourites. None of Les Amis deserved such lengthy characterization. But just look at this vile man! And it’s not even the first time he is portrayed, and there’ll be more ahead. I don’t want to know all these things about him! Enough! Stop!

However, several curious points caught my attention this time around. Firstly, he is NOT EVEN A FRENCH: “some Fleming from Lille, in Flanders.” This revelation explains his perceived flaws in Hugo’s eyes, especially his involvement at Waterloo, from whence he emerged. Additionally, his peculiar fashion choices are noteworthy: “he wore a blouse, and under his blouse an old black coat”—HOW? Even his few good qualities are tainted when he employs them. He drinks but doesn’t get drunk. He possesses some education and pretends to knowledge of philosophy, yet he is barely literate, using his limited knowledge and literacy for scheming and fraud. What a truly despicable man.

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Enjolras animation✨✨

Quality is a bit butchered🥲

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I mean he swore by the stars didn't he

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Cosette ran upstairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran, fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was, did the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress and venomous master. The Thénardier hostelry was like a spider’s web, in which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling. The ideal of oppression was realized by this sinister household. It was something like the fly serving the spiders.

two chapters ago, the rigging of the Orion was JVJ's spiderweb, and the man he rescued the fly. now, it's inverted: Cosette the fly, the Thénardiers the stalking spiders.

it was a kind of foreshadowing. just as Valjean freed his fly, so too is he coming to free Cosette. but at the same time, it's sort of a model of their respective prisons. Valjean escaped his by becoming the hunter, even in service of another man's liberty.

Cosette... has no such agency.

Valjean and Thénardier, meanwhile, are the same sort of creature: spiders. (Javert too is a spider, elsewhere.) but where Thénardier spins his webs to tighten the noose and extract everything of value and sustenance from his prey, Valjean spins his webs to set people free.

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CR’S New Post ft some of our Students. Do you prefer the students names or their real names? Also it’s adorable how Marius says his real name. Also JT at the end 😂

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The more details of the Thenardiers. Volume 2, Book 3, Chapter 2.

Clips from <Il cuore di Cosette>.

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One of Hugo's points in Les Misérables, especially in the Montreuil-sur-Mer chapters where "Monsieur Madeleine" is concerned, is that individual kindness isn't enough to create social justice and protect the vulnerable. Systemic changes are needed.

But of course, within the novel, systemic changes never happen. If they had happened, Hugo wouldn't have written the novel in the first place, because he was calling for those changes to be made.

The only sense of hope created within the plot itself – not Hugo's digressions, just the actual plot – comes from individual acts of goodness and heroism.

When I see that fact within the plot, and when I see systemic injustice in the real world that seems impossible to change, I want to say "I'll just do my best to be a compassionate, generous, socially conscious person. That's all we can do."

But Hugo emphasized that this isn't enough.

Even though Hugo urges us not to give in to despair, sometimes it's hard not to.

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There’s a fandom joke about the Waterloo digression not mattering to Les Mis, but I really love how all of Volume 2 takes place in its shadow. It’s strongly emphasized how everything is happening in the wake of these massive conflicts and wars.

The Ship Orion, where Jean Valjean is working as a convict, is a warship being used in the Spanish invasion. Now that Napoleon has been defeated, the French monarchy is sending their army to Spain to help violently assert the divine rights of the Spanish kings. The republic is dead, the empire is dead, and now it seems that monarchy will control France (and Europe) for a very long time.

The way that Madeleine “falls” and his town collapses without him feels like an echo of the fall of Napoleon.

Then, we reach “The Seargant of Waterloo” inn— where Thenardier has built his entire life on leeching off the legacy of Waterloo.

He made his initial fortune robbing the corpses at the battlefield, and now boasts/lies about having been a brave sergeant of Napoleon who rescued a general. He seems to worship violence and is desperate to enrich himself by exploiting anyone he can; he has all of Napoleon’s negative qualities, without any of his positive ones. Victor Hugo once insulted Napoleon III (the guy who exiled him) by calling him “Napoleon the Small”— and Thenardier feels like he could be a reference to that.

Outside of Thenardier we see other patrons of the inn talking about the Spanish wars, Napoleonic soldiers going to a fair to see a bird with coloration that reminds them of the tricolor flag, etc etc etc.

There’s this constant feeling of ordinary people existing under the shadows of this massive war, and its really fascinating to read!

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She turned to him with a stupefied air. “Éponine! How do you know that my name is Éponine?” “Promise what I tell you!” But she did not seem to hear him. “That’s nice! You have called me Éponine!”

— Les Misérables, IV.II.IV Illustrated by Adriano Minardi (Italian Edition, 1930)

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LM 2.3.2

my reaction to a lot of this chapter is just yikes. like, moving swiftly fucking onwards

"fourty, which is fifty in a woman" wowww

"colossal savages"??

so the only thing feminine about her is her interest in romance. right

HOW is your tailcoat UNDER your blouse

i will grant hugo "filousophe" that one works ('filou', according to wiktionary, means thief/rascal/trickster)

the detail about the champ d'asile is interesting because he does end up in america at the end of the book. was that a long-term ambition/back-up plan?

i completely glossed over the fact that he was flemish when i read the book the first time. hugo seems ... ahem, a little disdainful of this. when the bishop speaks different languages to diferent people it’s a good thing and a sign of his connection and dedication to the people under his care, but when thénardier does it he’s being slippery. right

"this giantess was jealous". right. because an ugly woman should be thankful that anyone has married her at all

i want so badly for the paragraph about mme. thénardier's submission to her husband to be satirical but i cannot convince myself. even the use of the words 'despot' and 'empire' only comes across as criticism of thénardier as a person rather than of how their marriage funtions

poor cosette. yikes

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Hugo’s descriptions of Mme Thénardier were sickeningly sexist and honestly just made me feel revolted by him, so I’m going to pass over that section for the most part. The only thing I do like about that section, though, is what it contributes to the end. There’s something particularly terrifying about being trapped between two diametrically opposed but still cruel people - Mme Thénardier and her immediate bursts of anger and M. Thénardier’s schemes and neglect - and I think highlighting this definitely increases the reader’s sympathy and pity for Cosette. Perhaps she would have clothes if she only had to deal with Mme Thénardier, or perhaps she would get a break from physical and verbal cruelty if she only had to tolerate M. Thénardier, but instead, she’s caught between them both. 

With regard to M. Thénardier, I’ve written before about how Hugo slips into classism in his descriptions of him (in the last chapter on Waterloo), and this instance is no exception. His comments on his lack of education being visible through his speech, for instance, are quite uncomfortable to read. At the same time, there’s more humor in this description of him, and some of it works in spite of Hugo’s prejudices. His use of contrasts, for example, is pretty funny (I can’t tell if him bring a man with a “sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy” or being “polite” “ even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing” is the better of these instances of dark humor, but either way, they effectively convey his contradictory nature and juxtapose his duplicitousness with his obviously intimidating wife). Similarly, while Hugo’s notes on his “pretensions” to literature can again be interpreted through the lens of class, it can also be seen as just what he says: pretentiousness. Moreover, his hypocrisy is clear even just from whom he cites. His “singular” use of Saint Augustine, despite everything about his obsession with wealth and his own standing contradicting his writings, is funny not only because of the contrast between Augustine and the Enlightenment thinkers he otherwise references, but because of the idea of a man as corrupt as Thénardier constantly (claiming to be) quoting a saint. (And of course, Hugo includes puns like filousophe that are probably also funny, but as I don’t know that much French, they’re probably best explained elsewhere).

We also get a brief follow-up to the Waterloo digression. Having read about Thénardier’s “rescue,” we know just how much he’s exaggerating in this story. We can also suspect that Hugo’s suspicion that he would have flourished elsewhere may be a product of his travels (seeing, for instance, the difference in traffic between rural and urban inns; and perhaps also coming to bear a grudge against an innkeeper or innkeepers as a whole). 

The relationship between the Thénardiers is also interesting in its use of political metaphors. Hugo’s description of Mme Thénardier’s obedience is revolting in its sexism and dehumanization of her, but why use “parliamentary language” and call M. Thénardier a “despot” with an “empire?” Not only do these terms underscore his control over the household, they link him to a corrupt form of political rule. It’s easy, then, to see parallels between the neglect going on in his household and the abuses perpetrated by a similarly tyrannical social order in France as a whole.

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- Quel beau marbre!

He said of Enjolras; “What beautiful marble!”

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Chapter 2.3.2 of Les Mis, "Two Complete Portraits," largely deals with things that Arai, working with a visual medium, works in throughout rather than saying explicitly. After all, why bother using words to describe what the Thenardiers look like if you can just depict it?

Arai instead uses pages 209–222 to really dig into the Thenardiers, their daughters, and how Cosette perceives them.

Of note, there's a bit of wordplay that didn't make it into the translation. On page 218 of the second English omnibus, one of the inn's patrons says to Thenardier, "You're smart as a real philoso…phaster," to which another patron chimes in, "Dontcha mean philosopher?!:

In the original Japanese, the first patron calls Thenardier a “tetsugakusha,” (philosopher, or one who studies wisdom) while the second calls him a “ketsugakusha.” (a made-up word which means one who studies butts).

(thanks to @vapaus-ystavyys-tasaarvo for noting this oh so many moons ago!)

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Chapter 2.3.1 of Les Mis, "The Water Question at Montfermeil," and guess what time it is? It's Little Cosette time!

:(

Arai gets in a glimpse of tiny Gavroche, alone and crying, from pages 223–224 of the second English omnibus, and hey, that's all right, I wasn't planning to use my heart for anything today anyhow.

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Chapter 2.2.3 of Les Mis, "The Ankle-Chain Must Have Undergone a Certain Preparatory Manipulation to be Thus Broken with a Blow from a Hammer" (whew, what a title!) includes the entirety of the Orion Incident. Most adaptations skip it, but Arai, having a multi-year serialized manga to play with, went for it.

The page count is actually longer in the manga (pages 194–204 in the second English omnibus) than in The Brick, and includes the entire incident from Valjean re-entering prison to Javert reading the newspaper account of Valjean's "drowning."

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Chapter 2.2.2 of Les Mis, "In Which The Reader Will Peruse Two Verses, Which are of the Devil's Composition, Possibly," again doesn't really get adapted directly by Arai. There's no Boulatruelle, no legend of the Devil burying a treasure in the woods, just, from pages 189–191 of the second English omnibus, Valjean burying his money in the woods, juxtaposed with the burial of Fantine.